Thanks for the feedback, that’s super interesting to me. I’m glad to hear they’ve come down in price more recently, for sure!

Oh snap I am really sorry to intrude but I have a question for someone like yourself who is an avid PC user and is also blind.

How do you feel about the prohibitive cost of braille terminals? I am not blind but I remember seeing the film Sneakers when I was young and the blind hacker Whistler using a braille terminal. As an adult I looked into them and was shocked that some cost more than a mid-range laptop. Are they even that useful or is this a relic that I recall but has been superseded by more useful assistive technologies?

Honestly, for real, a lot of low-power PCs are really useful once they have crap like Windows off of them and a lightweight Linux distro on them.

Welcome to being a luddite.

It’s not actually about hating the progression of technology, it’s realizing that your labor has been leveraged against you. You will not bear any of the true fruits, because your bosses will use the fruits of your labor to purchase the AI to replace you.

It’s because the labor market is fucked and developers needed unions 20 years ago instead of thinking because they were “rockstars” and “made the big bucks” that they didn’t need anybody else.

We wouldn’t have to ask these kind of questions if the fruits of our labor were being equitably distributed.

Basically in the scenario described, this is what’s happening to developers:

GIMP can be good, but it’s work-flow is almost entirely different, so it’s a learning curve. It doesn’t help that it looks more like Photoshop these days, so people can think it has similar workflow and then quickly be flummoxed as to how to do something that was simple in Photoshop.

He’s actually cutting off his own legs and soon he’ll be dancing on pegs.

Security Vendors (ie antivirus companies) don’t really care that an individual crack may or may not be dangerous on its own, but things like cracks often do display the kind of behavior viruses do, like modifying registries and verification files. While they make these things free for us to use, they’re technically doing things on the system the user isn’t supposed to do (because it impacts security/integrity).

Game cracks have been a long-used avenue for propagating viruses, so to serve their customers better, they probably err on the side of just assuming that they’re all potentially at risk. It’s a little over-the-top, but I can see the reasoning.

Finally, lot of antivirus companies are exactly that: companies. They exist to make a profit and they’re working with people who sell software by marking pirated copies of their software as malware, which in the view of the people who sell software: they are malware. So often the way they make money dictates what they treat as legitimate versus not legitimate. Especially in the US, where the government does a lot of work to support private companies in enforcing copyright.

In other words, it’s a crap shoot. I’d say if the virus signature only mentions it being a game crack it’s possibly safe, because if it actually contains a virus payload, I would think it would identify that one, too. It wouldn’t take a more serious virus and dump it under the “game crack” without more explanation, or at least I hope they don’t approach it that way.

Right, but the entire technical function of how bittorrent works is that it works better the more people are seeding and leeching, the “swarm.” By definition, this application is for a small group of people sharing files, which in my view limits its applicability compared to other, more direct options.

Why do I need a swam if I have so few peers that it’s going to be limited to my upload speed anyway? May as well just send it directly. Does that make sense?

When I say “overkill” that’s what I mean, it’s a technical approach that’s unsuited for what it’s aimed at because by the nature of how bittorrent works, the whole point is to speed up transfer speeds by distributing transfer among the swarm. When the swarm is three people that doesn’t actually happen (or not to the extent that it matters) and you may as well send the file directly to each recipient. (Further, direct transfer options have more options for data-in-transit encryption)

Perhaps it makes more sense if you’re doing really large files, but even then you’re still limited by the small swarm.

This is what happens when you feel ownership over a community.

He thinks “I built this community” and to an extent he’s correct, but as with the nature of communities, it doesn’t matter if he helped build it, the community is by definition made up of the people of the community… not just the guy who spearheaded things way back in the day. Especially something like an open source project, if he wanted this level of control he should have kept it closed source.

If you think you own your community, you’re in for a bad time.

Oh this is dope as hell thank you.

The smaller the swarm, the less functional bittorrent is.

Instant private trackers for a handful of people kind of feels like its missing the entire point of how bittorrent works.

There’s already secure, serverless ways to share a file with just a handful of people, this seems like overkill.

EDIT: Not trying to be rude, it’s still a cool idea and well executed.

There’s a reason that EU regulators agree with Epic, and it’s not because they’re motivated by Epic’s profit margins.

No offense, but the EU regulators shouldn’t need Tim Sweeney making this clear to them. They should have done something about monopolization on their own a decade ago. It’s honestly really pathetic that it took a large company taking on another large company for them to even notice this was a problem. The Apple store has been a monopolization tactic since day one. Apple’s app store has been around since 2008. It’s 2024.

If we’re all waiting on corporations to save us, we’re fucked.

Look dude, Gabe Newell and Tim Sweeney are capitalists just like anyone else with a big business. They make decisions based on profit, not on doing the most good. Breaking Terms of Service to get on the Apple store wasn’t a fucking holy war to save gamers from an evil corporation, it was one evil corporation taking a stab at another evil corporation because they wanted a cut of the profits.

Jesus, stop treating these people like they give a fuck about anything other than money. Valve is such a good example and people fucking flip out when you point out that nearly every positive thing they’ve ever done was actually forced on them due to legislation of some kind. Like being able to return games in a 2-hour play window? Pretty sure that was Australia that forced that one.

https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/video-games-website-steam-fined-3-million-for-refusing-refunds-20161223-gthdux.html

“Valve is a United States company with 2.2 million Australian accounts which received 21,124 tickets in the relevant period containing the word “refund” from consumers with Australian IP addresses,” Justice Edelman wrote in his judgement.

“Yet it had a culture by which it formed a view without Australian legal advice that it was not subject to Australian law, and it was content to proceed to trade with Australian consumers without that advice and with the view that even if advice had been obtained that Valve was required to comply with Australian law the advice might have been ignored.”

A court found in May that Steam’s website breached Australian Consumer Law because it stated consumers were not entitled to a refund and had no access to minimum quality guarantees.

Valve literally set up in Australia without ever once consulting Australian law, that’s the definition of being a sucky fucking business that’s more concerned with profit than, you know, following the law. They literally told gamers to go fuck themselves and that if they bought a game that was broken on release, they didn’t deserve a “minimum quality guarantee.”

Valve sucks, Epic sucks, they all suck because they’re all capitalists dude. In the end, the money matters, not the gamers, they’re just the source of the money. They only ever do genuinely good things when forced to by outside parties.

Found Tim Weenies Lemmy account.

Dude, you’re the one who talked about breaking rules like a fucking hero (“Break rules and fight back.”) and then was like “oh poor me I need to support people with a rare disease,” as if breaking the rules to get a point across won’t get your account banned. Pick a lane, either you want to stand up for people on there and spread messages about the LGBT+ community being vilified (which will get you banned) or you want to be there to be a support network for people with a rare disease (which means you can’t fuck around and get banned). You started and ended with two entirely contradictory positions. One is behavior that will get you banned, the other is stuff that you really don’t want to get banned to stay involved with, you don’t get to have both on Meta. Breaking rules and fighting back will literally get you banned and then oh boo hoo hoo you won’t be able to help your support groups.

Finally, you switched gears and you brought up the disability olympics to someone who is literally suffering and still manages to support others witout using Meta. (“Unlike you people I have to connect with people with a rare disease and I don’t have a choice.”) I responded because it’s a pathetic excuse to keep sucking down Meta’ s slop and the assumptive position of “unlike you” shows you are able and willing to assume things about others without knowledge of their actual situation, just because what they said upset you somehow. Shocker that when your assumption is flat out wrong that someone will take the time to respond. Take a look in the mirror.

You’re only back because your bid to end the conversation and make yourself look superior because you’re “helping people” when you’re actually just lining Zuck’s pockets is a joke. You don’t look like you’re helping people when I’m doing the same shit without Meta, and so you needed to come back and “prove” you’re right… again. (Which you failed because you’re actually offering two entirely contradictory positions: break rules and fight back versus stay to help those in need.)

Like why do you have such a hardon for being a Facebook hero? Let it go, man. You even describe in sensationalist terms that what I’m doing is a “holy war.” All I’m doing is saying we’re never going to make headway by thinking we have a voice in an authoritarian state, which is what Meta’s servers are. Sounds to me like you’re waging a “holy war” to make sure Zuck doesn’t lose a penny of his precious billions. Next you’ll tell me it’s really important to watch FOX News, too, for the same reasons somehow.

PS I know Europe uses the hell out of WhatsApp. People are fucking idiots who like to use things that are easy to use but also easy to exploit them with. WhatsApp should have never been trusted once it was bought by Meta. It’s not my fault people keep making bad decisions because its “easier.”

There already are!

https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/amazons-ai-based-just-walk-out-checkout-tech-was-powered-by-1000-indian-workers-manually-11712196827721.html

That’s what Amazon’s entire walkout checkout tech was. It was claimed it was all “automated” and turns out in this case, when people say “AI” it doesn’t mean “artificial intelligence” it means “actually Indians.”

Oh I can answer this one!

The areas with the highest anti-trans sentiment also consume the most trans pornography.

This is the anchor point, because they only interact with trans people through pornography, they view them as sexualized at their core.

This is why there’s so much “they shove their sexuality in our faces” talk because to these people, trans people existing at all is “shoving it in their face.”

Why? Once again, because they, in their own minds, have reduced trans people to sex objects.

The important part of it is that bit that says “(beneath photo of 17 year old girl)” because it’s just a photo. To look at a photo and immediately assume what they have going on their pants is the definition of sexualizing it. It’s just an innocuous photo of a teen, and now they’ve made it sexual by thinking way too much about what kind of genitals this innocent teen has. Literally, this could be a cisgender girl, no less. They’re flat out making an assumption, the example does not say one way or another. So what, does she need to show her pussy to these people to prove she’s cisgender and stop the abuse?

What does it say about a person when they see a photo of a teen and their first thought is about what genitals they have? It says they view everything through a lens of sex, and they have sexualized this girl for spending, once again, way too much time thinking about her genitals, genitals which have no impact on them as viewers of the photo.

By jumping to her genitals, they’ve sexualized it, and that’s because they only view trans people as sex objects.

Metafilter is from the late 90’s and still isn’t overrun with bots and other bullshit and it’s still widely used by many professionals. (God damn it, they had that name since 1999 as well, long before “Meta.”)

You know the difference? They didn’t prioritize explosive cancer-like growth and instead prioritized community and thus it’s still a great site with plenty of people, plenty of discussion, and almost no “viruses,” to use your analogy.

The 90’s was also when there were thousands of different websites and not everything was centralized on Facebook/Reddit/Xitter. We’re simply reverting to that better version of the internet.

Also things like transparent moderation logs exist in the fediverse, so there’s more controls the users have to see if their admins/mods are actually working in their interests. Everything on the centralized platforms is a blind “trust us.”

So it’s okay for them to make deals with the military, but not for people to show what their deals with the military contractors might look like… They’re literally working with Palmery Luckey’s military hardware/surveillance company Anduril…

https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/12/04/1107897/openais-new-defense-contract-completes-its-military-pivot/

https://www.anduril.com/

I would call them hypocrites but they don’t care because all they care about is the application of power.

This right here is why decentralized media like Lemmy and Mastodon are important.

Because they’re the only kind of places where this isn’t explicitly always happening (instead of only sometimes on some shitty servers that nobody else federates with)

These are the last places that you will actually be able to have relatively real, unfiltered conversations as opposed to corporate-curated conversation.